Orphan blocks are fun to work with.  There is a reason why they were made and then put away.  Getting beyond the reason and making a quilt from these blocks is hard to do.  Years ago, I made several small blocks with the same pattern.  I don’t remember why I made them,  but I must have been learning a new technique.

Some are pastel.  Some are green and white.  They are all very plain if left on their own.

 

 

The pale green and coral blocks are set in a nine patch format.  Five of the blocks are in a straight setting and four are in a diagonal setting.  The center block is a straight setting with coping strips on four sides that enlarge it to the size of the blocks that are set in the diagonal setting.  The strips are the same color as the outer border.  The four diagonal set blocks have coping triangles.  The triangles are two different colors which make a star.  The four corners have coping strips on two sides.  They are the same color as the outer triangles, which make it look like a border.  There is a small outer border that is the same color as the star and then the outer border.

I wanted to do something different with the green and white blocks.  They needed brightening up so I put two together with gold sashing.  I auditioned several fabrics but couldn’t find anything that looked good.  Then, I found the border fabric.  I pulled the sashing colors from the border fabric and the quilt came together.  It just happened.  The inner border is small because that is all the fabric that I had left after making the larger sashing in the center.  This quilt was a happy accident.  Maybe I should call it by that name.

Most of my orphan blocks are together.  I can see several quilts in the future.  They are a little different than a UFO.  A UFO just gets finished.  When making an orphan block, you have to think outside of the box.

Have a great day and happy quilting.

Dear Jane has been sitting in her suitcase for a while.  She has outgrown the project box and is now stored in a small suitcase.  Twenty five of the center blocks are finished and pieced together.  The blocks are hand quilted and then individually bound and sewn together in the pot holder method.

Originally, I had intended to make each row as it went around the center of the quilt, but my intentions became derailed.

I have the EQ Dear Jane app.  If anyone decides to make a Dear Jane quilt, it would be worth their while to purchase this cd.  There is a wealth of information and printable patterns and instructions.

One day I printed several rows of   instructions.  Then, I found fabric that is close to the original and put it with the pattern. The pile of instructions and fabric is in the suitcase for whenever I decide to work on Dear Jane.

Each pattern gives hints on how the block should be pieced.  Some are foundation pieced, some are rotary cut and some are appliqued.  I have been taking the top pattern and making that block. They are not in any order.  Each block is placed in a baggie when it is together and then placed in a box.  All the baggies in the box are waiting for hand sewing. I won’t have to look for hand sewing to do for a while.

Twelve blocks are finished and waiting to be sewn to the main quilt.

 

 

Three blocks are quilted, the binding is sewn on and is waiting for the binding to be tacked down.

 

 

Ten blocks need to be quilted.

There are three applique blocks.  One is reverse applique.  There will be pictures of the applique blocks when they are finished.

There are so many different techniques.  Each block is prettier than the one before.  I’m amazed at how much fun it is to work on the Dear Jane quilt.

When I complete all of the blocks that I’ve started, one third of the center blocks will be finished.  There is still a lot more to do.

 

Have a great day and happy quilting.

 

Today is Miss Molly’s birthday.  She is nine years old.  We have had her in our family since she was nine weeks old.

Wire Fox Terriers are so cute when they are little.

 

Miss Molly used to dig holes everywhere when she was a puppy.  I’m so glad that she stopped doing that.  We had to be careful where we walked.

 

 

 

 

 

Her brother was Max, a Miniature Schnauzer.  Max was an awesome dog.   Usually an older dog teaches a younger dog how to behave.  Miss Molly didn’t listen to Max at all.  She became the boss when very young.

 

 

Miss Molly is highly educated.  She has passed level 1, level 2, and level 3.  She was at the point of taking her companion dog exam when I decided she had gone far enough.  She also has taken agility classes, sniff and search lessons, and dance lessons.  She prefers to dance to Latin music.  When dogs dance, it is just obedience done to music.  She has a few steps, but only dances when she feels like it.  I can hide treats and she searches until she finds them.  Miss Molly will do anything for a treat.  When meeting Miss Molly, you wouldn’t know that she had any training.  She chooses when to obey.

 

 

When I had Miss Molly groomed for the first time, she changed from a fluffy puppy to a very sophisticated dog.

She is afraid of thunder storms.

 

Miss Molly takes her job of quality control inspector very seriously.  She checked out the new Japanese fabric scraps.  They passed inspection.  We are allowed to use them.

 

 

She loved the Canadian 150 quilt.  Now she is inspecting a 30 year old UFO as I hand quilt it in the evening.  It’s a good thing it’s a king size so I have space to quilt and she has space to inspect.

Everyone should have a quality control inspector that is as good as Miss Molly.

 

 

 

Have a great day and happy quilting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Guild in Maine is having a block draw.  We were given a pattern and two fat quarters of beautiful fabric.  The fabric was to go in the flying geese row, just outside the center star.  We added our own fabric for the rest of the block.

The block is 18″ square finished and is made of flying geese. squares,  and half square triangles.  It was easy to make even though it looks complicated.  Someone from the Guild will win all the blocks in a drawing.  Even if I don’t win the blocks, I have the pattern and might make more blocks for my own quilt.

 

 

 

 

I’m still working to catch up with the Moda Blockhead series.  I made a 24″ block.  The next block was a 12″ square  applique block.  I didn’t want to make an applique block, so I substituted the draw block, leaving out one row to make it the right size.  It was quicker to make that the original block.  The omitted row had eight small half square triangles in the corners.  Leaving out that row didn’t detract from the block.  It looks like a star within a star block.

Have a great day and happy quilting.

I haven’t pieced any of the Moda Blockhead blocks since I came back to New Hampshire.  I had decided to take a break for a while. It has been a long while as I was nine blocks behind.  It doesn’t seem as if I’ve been back that long.

The instructions are printed for all nine and I have started to catch up.  I have finished piecing six blocks, but somehow, one of the blocks is missing.  I spent some time this afternoon picking up the sewing room but couldn’t find it.  At least, I have a neater sewing room.  I’m not going to keep looking.  It will show up sometime when I’m looking for something else.

I still have lots of the Japanese fabric to finish this project and make at least two more bed quilts.

There are about ten more blocks to come.  Then I will find out how to set them together.  If there isn’t sashing between them, I may machine quilt them individually and put them together pot holder style.  It’s much easier to quilt a small block than a whole quilt.

The Century block is finished.  All the examples for a demonstration at Guild are pieced.  The demo is tonight.  I have four more pieces waiting to be quilted.  That pile grows too fast.  Fortunately, they are smaller pieces and will quilt quickly.

Have a great day and happy quilting.

 

I had intended to write about something else tonight, but for some unknown reason my  phone is not sending my photos to the computer.  Hopefully, it’s just a temporary glitch.  I will go to my photo files and write about something else.

For years, I designed the block of the month for the Guild.  I made sample blocks to see if my instructions were understandable. Sampler quilts are fun to make.  I still have several blocks waiting to go into a finished quilt.  I also made blocks of the month from different quilt designers on the Internet.

This is a Puzzle quilt.  There are twenty blocks, but only ten patterns.  To solve the puzzle, you have to match  the blocks that have the same pattern.  It is harder to match them up than you think it is.  I finally wrote the answer on the back of the quilt so that I would remember.

 

 

Using the white sashing with green triangles on the corner give this quilt a secondary pattern. Green stars pop up when looking at it closely.

 

 

 

 

 

This quilt was designed for the quilter to find their own quilt patterns.  Hints were: find a pattern that begins with the first letter of your first name.  Find a pattern that has to do with weather.  Find a pattern that has an animal in it’s name. There were many other hints.  Every quilt was different.  The quilter could choose the size of the blocks and the setting.

 

 

I don’t know why this quilt has only eight blocks. It looks as if I added fancy corner triangles to the two red center blocks to make them the same size as the outside blocks with the multiple sashing.

 

 

 

 

It’s amazing how four sampler quilts can look so different with a change in sashing or setting.

 

Have a great day and happy quilting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Annie Louise is my mother’s doll.  I always thought that she was a china doll, but when researching dolls and doll clothes from the early 1900s, I decided that she didn’t look like a china doll.  She was a bisque doll. Her face is not shiny.  I couldn’t find any dolls that looked just like her. She has a jointed leather body.

Annie Louise is dirty and needs a new wig, along with new clothes.  I’ve decided to clean her up and restore her.  Pinterest has a site where it shows how to measure a doll and using a regular person’s pattern, cut it down for doll clothes.  I have measured all of Annie Louise’s measurements.  She is 19 1/2″ tall.  Her bust line is the same as her waist.  As I turned her over to measure her back, I noticed some letters on her neck.  Now I know what she is.

The letters are AM95 4DEP  The Internet is wonderful.  This is what I found.

Annie Louise is an Armand Marseille doll.  Located in Koppeisdorf, in the Thuringia region of Germany, the Armand Marseille doll company was the heart of the German doll making revolution in the 1890’s manufacturing 1,000 doll heads a day from 1900 to 1930.  Armand Marseille was born in St Petersburg Russia and was a butcher before becoming a successful doll manufacturer.

By 1910, 800 workers were in the factory and home trade.

Almost all of Armand Marseille’s doll heads were made of bisque.  He did not make his own doll bodies, but purchased them from other manufacturers.  AM dolls were promotional dolls.  The AM factory made doll heads in all price ranges, according to the buyer’s price range.

Montgomery Ward ordered cheaper dolls. I know that my Grandmother ordered from catalogues as she had an Aladdin home.  It was purchased through the Sears catalog.

The dolls marked AM95 4DEP are not valuable according to the Internet.  Most for sale are in Annie Louise’s condition.  She is valuable to me because she belonged to my mother and is very pretty. I love her big blue eyes and the dimple in her chin.

My Great Grandfather was a photographer so I have photos of my ancestors in their beautiful dresses.  Now that I know Annie Louise’s measurements and have instructions on how to cut from those measurements, I plan to recreate those dresses for Annie Louise.  I’ll start with her undergarments.  I haven’t made doll clothes for a long time.  I should remember how after a few tries.

I’ve been saving fabric, laces and other items that I thought might be useful.

Soon, she will have a new wig.  I think brown would be a good color for her. Maybe, I will consider blond hair because of her blue eyes.  My mother told me that she had a long, real hair wig.  My grandmother was very angry when my mother gave Annie Louise a short haircut.

With some bisque cleaner, her face would look much better. I’ve found a wonderful doll supply company.  Now that I know what kind of a doll she is, I might be able to find more information on their site.

I already have a quilt for Annie Louise and enough fabric left over to make a matching dress or robe. This project will be a lot of fun.

I’ll post updates on her progress from time to time.

Have a great day and happy quilting.

 

 

 

Yippee !!!  Two more UFOs finished.  These two small wall hangings were made years ago.  After they were made, they were put aside.  Every time they came to the top of the pile, I put them down to the bottom again.

Now that I want to finish all my UFOs, I was determined to finish them and put them into the giveaway bin.

One of the reasons that I didn’t finish this one was that I ran out of fabric for the side and top outer sashing. It’s a good size for a baby quilt.  The baby won’t notice.  Better finished than perfect.   Angela Walters has some very good YouTube videos.  I’ve started to watch them and am going to practice whatever she teaches on my UFOs.  On this piece, I practiced echo quilting with a ruler.  It does make a straight line.  The black squares are stipple quilted.  The light green sashing has curved quilting.  Angela showed how to both free motion quilt and ruler quilt curves.  I free motion quilted the curves.  I did find that the more I practiced, the better it looked.  The red border is quilted with a leaf background filer.  This piece will go into the giveaway bin.

The second wall hanging was quilted with an even feed foot.  It was just straight line quilted.  I could have free motion or ruler quilted, but decided to just quilt it and have it done.  After I finished it, I decided that it would look very nice as a topper on a white table cloth on my dining room table.  I will keep this one.

 

I was looking for a certain color blue for a project and found another bunch of orphan blocks.   They were in with some mile a minute blue fabric.  I must have wanted to cut them up at one time, but they look pretty good.  I’ll make another orphan block quilt with them.  There might be enough of them for a Linus quilt.

Have a great day and happy quilting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I quite often say that I am a quiltmaker, not a quilter.  If a person makes tents, he is called a tentmaker, not a tenter. One of my friends gave me this pin today.  I will wear it proudly and state that I am a quiltmaker.

 

 

I’ve gathered together all of the orphan blocks that I could find.  I’m sure that there are more around somewhere.  One of my goals this year is to put these blocks into quilts and not have them just laying around.  If I do that this year and finish some of the UFOs that are already pieced, my quilts in progress will diminish.

A very long time ago I won the blocks of the month at a Guild that I used to belong to.  As I remember, it was a stormy, snowy night and not many members showed up.  There were only six blocks including mine.  The theme was sunflowers.  The blocks have been in a baggie ever since. When I decided to put them together this week, I found the date 1994 on one of the blocks.  These are really old blocks.

It is hard to put six blocks into a quilt.  The blocks were slightly different sizes.  One was dark.  They did have the same sunflower theme.

I decided on a nine patch format.  Some of the blocks would be in a straight set and some in a diagonal set.  Frames were added to each block and then the blocks were all trimmed to the same size.

The diagonal blocks had triangles added to each corner.  The straight set had sashing added.  The fabric colors were chosen so that when the piece is quilted, the frames would blend in.

The center block had the dark background,  It is a 3-D block.  The sunflower petals are elongated prairie points.  The leaves are two sided and attached by the vein stitching,  It has two sashing borders.  One is a light yellow and the outside border matches the fabric on the blocks that butt up to it. It is a straight set.

 

One of the side blocks has pieced small squares for the center with prairie points around it.  The stem and leaves are appliqued. It is on point and has triangles at the four corners.

 

 

The other side block is appliqued. It is on point and has triangles at the four corners.

 

 

The top block is a star.  The pale yellow fabric between the star sides  is gathered at the base. It is on point and has triangles at the four corners.

 

 

The bottom block is a Dresden plate. It is on point and has triangles at the four corners.

 

 

That left one block and four corners to fill. That was the block that I had made.  I cut the Dresden Plate block into four pieces and framed it.  Then I added strips to make a log cabin that was the same size as the other blocks.

 

After the nine pieces were sewn together, I added a single gold frame.  This wall hanging is different, but after all these years the blocks are finally ready to be quilted.

 

 

 

 

When you make a block, you can add to it or you could cut it up.  It is your block and you can do what you want with it.

Have a great day and happy quilting.

 

 

Have a great dayt

 

Happy New Year.  It doesn’t seem possible that this is the last post of 2018.  There will be lots of new quilts in 2019.  I have listed all the quilts that I’m currently working on and will finish them in order.  Of course, I will make new quilts.  I have lots of ideas in my head.

The Temperature Quilt top is finished.  It has been fun watching the weather all year.  It is one quilt that when someone asks me how long did it take to finish, I can honestly say one year (365 days).  That’s not the quilting, just the piecing.  I’m not sure if I will quilt it myself or send it to a long arm quilter.  It turned out to be a big quilt.

 

In 2018, the temperature did not go below 0 or above 100.  I didn’t use any of the fabric in those baggies.  It is also interesting how the colors on the left side move to the colors on the right side.  It makes for an even quilt.

 

 

There is enough batique fabric left to make another quilt.  I bought a pattern at Keepsake years ago.  It is perfect for the leftover fabric.

Have a great day and happy quilting.